In the late 1970s, when Paul Thomas Anderson was growing up in the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles, he was acutely aware of one of the area's busiest industries - hard-core pornography. "You would see people going into these big warehouses, and you just knew what they were doing," Anderson says. He was only nine years old at the time. A few years later he was avidly checking out the output of those warehouses, surreptitiously watching films from his father's pornographic video collection.
About the same time, on the east coast of the US, Mark Wahlberg, who's a year younger than Anderson, was getting streetwise early, growing up in a tough Boston neighbourhood. He was the ninth and youngest child in a working-class Catholic family living in a cramped three-bedroom apartment. Wahlberg was breakdancing on street corners when he was 12 and drifting into crime. At the age of 16 he served 45 days in a penitentiary when he was convicted of assaulting a Vietnamese man.
Now 27, Anderson has tapped into his youthful memories for his second feature film as a writerdirector, the provocative and exhilaratingly well-made Boogie Nights, which stars Mark Wahlberg and has been earning both of them rave reviews in the US - although the film's controversial subject matter may prove too hot a potato to achieve much recognition in next month's Oscar nominations.
Spanning seven years onwards from 1977, Boogie Nights is an ambitious epic chronicle of the Los Angeles hard-core porn film industry. Powering along at a driving pace for a vibrant twoand-a-half hours, it captures a persuasive picture of this hedonistic pre-AIDS era of drugs and sex excesses, glaringly tacky clothing and pounding disco music.
Into this tawdry neon underworld comes an impressionable 17-year-old dishwasher from southern California. Thrown out of home by his mother who derides him as a loser, Eddie (played by Mark Wahlberg) finds a surrogate family in the extended entourage of a skinflick director named Jack Horner. Played by Burt Reynolds, Horner naively dreams of elevating his craft into an art form. In the old backstage musical tradition, he spots Eddie in a nightclub and perceives the young man's very prominent sexual endowment as a future box-office attraction. Eddie responds with boundless enthusiasm and renames himself Dirk Diggler.
In this sharp, insightful drama of decadence and self-destruction, Anderson never feels the need to moralise about his many principal characters and his treatment of them is ultimately thoughtful and even tender. "These people are all searching for their dignity," Anderson believes. "They're just trying to find themselves."
The brilliant extended finale, which reveals the fates of those characters, is a tour de force. Unlike the coy Full Monty, that closing sequence also dares to reveal the much-admired (and prosthetically created?) appendage of Dirk Diggler.
Accompanied by an incessant soundtrack of pop music from the time and marked with a keen eye for detail in its sets and costumes, Boogie Nights features the immensely confident Mark Wahlberg in a star-making performance and a craggy-faced, greytoupeed Burt Reynolds in his best performance since Deliverance. The fine cast also features Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Alfred Molina and the late Robert Ridgely.
Boogie Nights stands at the forefront of cinema's current curious fascination with the 1970s, which exerts itself in imminent movies such as Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, with Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline and Joan Allen as post1960s suburban liberals at the time of the Watergate crisis. There are also Todd Haynes's picture of the British glitter rock era, Velvet Goldmine, with Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys Meyers; Brian Gilbert's comedy of a 1970s rock band named Strange Fruit in Still Crazy, starring Billy Connolly, Stephen Rea and Jimmy Nail; and two New York disco era pictures, 54 (named after the club, Studio 54) with Mike Myers, and Whit Stillman's The Last Days Of Disco.
Even though Paul Thomas Anderson was only turning 10 when the 1970s ended, he has created a remarkably authentic picture of the time with spot-on choreography employed as characters in flares, flyaway collars and platform shoes dance under mirror balls while the soundtrack pumps out, among many others, Boney M's Sunny, Emotions's Best Of My Love, Andrew Gold's Lonely Boy, McFadden & Whitehead's Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now, the Commodores's Machine Gun, ELO's Livin' Thing and a single turned into a hit all over again by The Full Monty, Hot Chocolate's You Sexy Thing.
"I have very specific memories of how Los Angeles looked and felt at that time," says Anderson. "The story dictated the time, and it just happened to set itself in a wonderful period of music and fashion." To capture the world of hard-core pornography, he says he viewed "a ton of porno movies" and visited the sets of others while they were in production. He says he has long been fascinated by the life and times of the prolific porn actor, John Holmes, and that he gave copies of Exhausted, a documentary on Holmes, to key members of the cast.
Given the nature of the movie, Boogie Nights ought to have been much more difficult to finance, Anderson observed when we talked in London recently, but he had no problem in persuading New Line Cinema to back the project. "I guess it should have been harder than it was," he says. "There probably should be some romantic story of how we struggled to get the money. But New Line loved the script, so the finance came easily.
"My theory on it is this - we made it relatively cheaply by Hollywood terms, and all New Line had to do was sit back and say, `Even if this thing is a major disaster, what do we have? We have naked people and a couple of guns, so we can at least sell it that way. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. And we have Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Bill Macy, so that will get us X amount of dollars'. There's no real risk in Hollywood if you make a movie cheap enough because they know they can get their money back. Then it's just a case of holding their breath."
In addition to unwittingly triggering his son's early interest in pornography, Paul Thomas Anderson's father also fuelled the boy's enthusiasm for film-making when, in 1982, he bought a Betamax video camera and encouraged him to experiment with it. Before he finished high school, the boy had already written and shot the half-hour film, The Dirk Diggler Story, in which Boogie Nights had its genesis.
As he waited for an opportunity to extend his ambitions as a filmmaker, Anderson worked as a production assistant on music videos and television films, before making the short film, Cigarettes And Coffee in 1991, which got him accepted into the film-makers' workshop at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. Five years later he made a notable feature film debut with Sydney, an intriguingly structured and coolly methodical drama set in the gambling realms of Las Vegas and Reno. It was selected for one of the sidebar sections at Cannes in 1996, finally opened in London recently under the title Hard Eight and may yet get a release here before it goes to video.
In the film Anderson elicits fine performances from the four actors around whom his screenplay is built - Philip Baker Hall as an ageing, mysterious and worldweary Nevada denizen; John C. Reilly as the down-at-heel young man to whom he becomes a surrogate father; Samuel L. Jackson as a brash, small-time crook; and Gwenyth Paltrow as an insecure waitress who bolsters her income through prostitution.
However, when Anderson approached Paltrow with the screenplay for Boogie Nights, she turned it down flat, saying it would kill her grandfather if she made it. "She's an actress that I love," says Anderson, "and given that she was in my first movie I felt there was a responsibility to go to her and offer her Boogie Nights. I wasn't comfortable asking her to go naked, because she's like a sister to me, and she said no."
Did the theme and content of the movie deter other actors? "Yes and no," says Anderson. "Sure, some people didn't want to meet me. But then it was clear from the script what the film was, so there could be no confusion on any actor's part about what they were getting into."
Nevertheless, the movie is rather less explicit than might have been expected. Anderson explains that he was contractually obliged to deliver a film which would qualify for an R (Restricted) rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. "I knew what I'd signed up for and basically how far I could go," he says, "and a lot of that was done for me by the MPAA. That's not to say that any scene was taken out of the movie. I shot it the way I wanted to shoot it when we were on the set. I figured I could deal with the MPAA later in the editing."
He eventually agreed to "trim" around 40 seconds of footage to keep the MPAA happy. "It wasn't like I wanted to shoot penetration shots," he says. "I didn't feel the need to do that. And even if I showed you the kind of stuff I cut out, you'd still think it was kinda tame. It's like an extra two seconds of Mark's butt, for example, another few seconds here and another few there. I focused on what I thought was important to keep on the screen."
At one point he planned to reinsert the trimmed footage in the laser-disc version of the movie, which would be unrated in the US. "But when I looked back at the stuff I cut out, about 40 seconds, I felt I didn't miss having it and didn't need it any more."
In an astutely cast film, choosing Burt Reynolds to play Jack Horner was inspired - and has revived the actor's flagging career to the point that he is the most likely member of the Boogie Nights cast and crew to secure an Oscar nomination. He already has been named best supporting actor of 1997 by the New York and Los Angeles film critics' circles.
"He and I are with the same agency," says Anderson, "which helped in getting to meet him, and I was able to show him my first movie, which he liked. He liked the script of Boogie Nights a lot and was really anxious to play the part. On the set there was this fatherly thing about him, like he felt, `I'm in with the kids here. Do your little camera tricks. I'll be Burt'. Everyone realised that he was not only the oldest guy on the set, but he's Burt Reynolds and that demands a certain amount of respect and attention, which was applied."
In casting the central role of Dirk Diggler, Paul Thomas Anderson chose Mark Wahlberg, the former rap singer once best known for taking his clothes off in public. In sharp contrast to the stubbly and sloppily dressed Anderson, the muscular and unexpectedly soft-spoken Wahlberg was wearing a smart black V-neck sweater and designer brown trousers when we met in London. Wearing the tacky 1970s clothes he has in the movie was more embarrassing than simulating sex on screen, he jokes.
What put him on the straight and narrow after his 45 days in jail back when he was 16? Given his image and notoriety, Wahlberg's reply takes one aback. "I have a parish priest I have to answer to regularly," he says. "I've always been very religious. I was being rebellious and then I found myself with nowhere to go. I realised that I had strayed away from my spirituality and that I had to change my life."
One of his older brothers, Donnie Wahlberg, had founded the pop group, New Kids on the Block, of which Marky Mark, as Mark was then known, was a member briefly - before they became the biggest teen idols in the world for one of those butterfly-spans teen idols enjoy. Marky Mark went off and formed a rap band, the Funky Bunch, and scored a few hit singles with Good Vibrations and Wildside and a hit album with Music For The People.
He attracted less media attention for his music than for his penchant for taking off his shirt and dropping his trousers on stage. In 1992 he published a picture book about himself and dedicated it to his penis. As luck would have it, all that physical and media exposure came to his rescue when the Funky Bunch's second album flopped and Marky Mark was hired as a Calvin Klein model, posing in white underwear on massive billboards across the US.
"My body is just something I was born with," he says. "I really wanted to get away from all of that and I thought if any movie could do it, this would. It's so weird because I do take my clothes off in the film. I am naked in it, and all that stuff. But that's the least important part of it."
In fact, he had some reservations when Paul Thomas Anderson sent him the Boogie Nights screenplay. His parish priest already had expressed his displeasure with the thriller, Fear, the movie which gave Wahlberg his first starring role and featured him as a sinister young sexual obsessive.
"I read the script and met with Paul," he says. "I thought it was such a funny, disturbing and totally original story, but there were also a lot of things in it that I was scared of." Such as? "I didn't want to run around naked. I didn't want to say some of those things in it. But after I met Paul I felt I had to be in it. It's more than about sex, it's about these people and their lives. So I told Paul I would do whatever he wanted me to do."
Asked about Wahlberg's full monty at the end of Boogie Nights, Anderson says, "It's sad when an actor's daring enough, as Mark was, to show his penis in the movie, and then people go and immediately assume it's prosthetic." Wahlberg, sitting next to Anderson, contradicts him. "I wasn't there for that part of the shoot, but everyone thinks it's me. That can prove pretty disappointing for people in my personal life."
And what of his parish priest's view of Boogie Nights? "I haven't got a call from him since it came out," Mark Wahlberg replies. "I imagine he may sit through a couple of minutes of it before he walks out."
Boogie Nights goes on release in Ireland on February 27th